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Applying the three Rs to satellites

The canonical "three Rs" of sound resource management are reduce, reuse and recycle.

The European Space Agency is applying this in a very clever way to providing satellite radio service to people on the ground.

Although broadcast television satellites are quite well built, they typically run out of fuel in a decade or so. Unable to correct their position, they drift -- making them useless for television broadcasting. However, if you could track them, you could still use them as a broadcast source.

The ground system developed by the ESA takes advantage of these satellites' durability by placing a tracking receiver, tied to a cache, into a car on the ground. The receiver can then maintain signal as the car drives, precaching signal for those times when the car goes through a tunnel or otherwise loses the feed -- just as modern "skip-proof" CD players precache music so they can keep playing evenly as you smack over a speed bump.

Should this go into wide use, it will represent an impressive reuse of "obselete" space systems, with the dual benefits of reducing the need for new systems and the expense of providing this type of service.

We've introduced a lot of infrastructure into the world, and we tend to drop it long before it actually becomes useless. Adaptations like this are part of our new wave of combined fiscal and environmental responsibility.

BBC article

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